Lady Gaga: Harlequin review – Joker companion album does jazz standards with a garish grin

AAt the recent London premiere of the twisted musical love story Joker: Folie à Deux, Lady Gaga, who stars as Harleen “Lee” Quinzel/Harley Quinn, was asked about her relationship with the character. After studying method acting for a decade in her teens and becoming highly adept at chaotically entertaining press tours for House of Gucci and A Star Is Born, Gaga described “a complex woman who wants to be whoever she wants to be at any time.” . If the merger between Harley Quinn and herself wasn’t already obvious, she added, “And she won’t let anyone pin her down.”

And so it is that, after teasing a seventh album of pop bangers early next year, with the first single apparently due next month, Gaga is now dropping what was teased on billboards as ‘LG6.5’, a jazz-tinged number. , 40-minute big band curio consisting of 13 songs. Harlequin is billed as a ‘companion album’ to the Joker sequel, rather than a proper Lady Gaga release, and features a number of covers in addition to two originals. Within the context of Gaga’s discography, it is closer to Cheek to Cheek and Love for Sale, her two albums of jazz standards with Tony Bennett, than her last album, the cyberpunk-influenced 2020 electro-pop opus, Chromatica.

In fact, it’s actually Gaga’s recent glitzy Vegas residency, Jazz & Piano, turned into an album. Opener Good Morning, a cover of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney’s 1939 classic, sets the tone, with brass chirping, jaunty piano and booming double bass. Gaga sounds completely in control and skips around the song with a flourish, but there is a strong smell of big band week on The X Factor that is difficult to change. It’s not helped by the obvious choice of songs, which you think make more sense in the context of the film, but do we really need more versions of Get Happy, That’s Entertainment or closer That’s Life? Do we need any more proof that Gaga can indeed really sing and that she does indeed have a jazz background, thank you very much?

Much better is the more relaxed World on a String, recorded by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Jermaine Jackson, which is built on a tightly wound guitar figure that soon relaxes into a warm swell of organ and echoey drums. There’s a lightness to the way Gaga glides through the melody, especially when she sings, “Can’t you see I’m in love?” (Her fiancé, Michael Polansky, serves as the album’s executive producer.)

After teasing fans on social media in recent weeks with photos of her near electric guitars, it’s a relief to hear them in her full-blooded, ragged version of The Joker (last heard as the theme tune to the Australian sitcom and enduring meme-maker Kath & Kim), which sounds like it could have tied in nicely with 2016 country-rock opus Joanne. When she lets go with a big grunt, ‘the Joker MEEEEEBy the end you wish there had been a little more of this energy. However, Oh, When the Saints reverses the amnesty on pop stars and guitars with a truly unpleasant solo that smacks of keyboard fingering.

More of a curiosity than a classic, Harlequin will please fans of impeccably covered jazz standards, the big band apologists, and Gaga fans who felt she had lost some of her enthusiasm for music during Chromatica’s lengthy pregnancy. Here she sounds completely engaged, happy and completely in her element as she jumps between Harley Quinn’s different moods. Tellingly, on the original Happy Mistake, which provides insight into Quinn/Gaga’s psyche amid acoustic guitar and snatches of electronic noise, she sings, “I can try to hide behind the makeup, but the show must go on.” Nevertheless, it’s a show that feels like the prelude to a slightly more interesting next act.